


hold my hand (it's a long way down to the bottom of the river)

by dovedimpled



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, and it blows up in his face, and then he gets this bright idea, he doesn't even get the appeal of ladies, peter's not a dad, seriously good going champ
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-25
Updated: 2014-11-25
Packaged: 2018-02-26 23:31:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2670479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dovedimpled/pseuds/dovedimpled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wendy knows only the cage, the nighttime sounds of the jungle, and the heavy weight of Peter's sneering eyes. She's old lace, soft and muted, and Peter can't decide whether he hates her silent refusal to become something as ugly as him or if he respects her ability to retain the pieces of herself he sought to destroy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hold my hand (it's a long way down to the bottom of the river)

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a line from Delta Rae's absolutely gorgeous and chilling "Bottom of the River."
> 
> So I'm playing fast and loose with OUAT canon because I don't even want to think about Peter Pan being Rumple's father and I just really, really, really like the thought of Peter Pan having the cruelty and the hyper-charged jagged violence of a boy on the verge of becoming a man and clawing at everything within his reach because that's all he knows how to do. He's a more complex character to me that way--an eternal boy, hanging to the barest hint of youth via his boyish looks and his cheekiness but an absolute jaguar behind the facade. A boy like that caught up in lust for the first time--oh man, that could get heated and horrifying and upsetting and lovely, you know?

Wendy grips the bars of her cage, long-used to the splinters and the spiders dropping from the spindly branches of Neverland’s trees to nest in her prison’s nooks and crannies.

A hundred years is a long time to be alive and a time longer still to jump at the things that scare her, but she still fears. She might even say she fears comfortably--Peter’s sly grin darkened by humid night air, lit up only with a malice that has carved out almost everything else; her mind dulled without the whetstone of being able to move freely, without the stimulation of conversation; degrading thoughts of how bad she has to smell before Peter lets her bathe.

Wendy Darling fears so much because she has been given so much to fear, but she’s begun to fear everything with the worn-in welcome of an old friend. It’s been one of her only constants for decades. She fears the spiders as well, but she fears them as gently and softly as old blankets shrouding a shivering body.

While she’s absently sliding her fingers against the bristly rope holding her cage’s bars together, a rustle in the nearby thickets alerts her to a presence.

She takes a shaky breath and waits.

Sure enough, he drifts out of the foliage like mist, unhurried.

“Evening, Wendy,” Peter drawls, elongating every vowel mockingly, “May I enquire after your day?”

What does it say about her, she wonders, that his sneering words and cruel, handsome face have become as dear to her as the memory of her mother’s perfume bottles lined up carefully on her vanity?

She’s not angry in the least at his taunting.

But she is tired.

Wendy gives the smallest of sighs, unable to shake the gravity which has fallen over her like a mantle in the last century. She is such a mystery to herself these days, her feelings no longer simple or easy. These days she feels lovingly resentful. Gravely playful.

“I think,” she tells him, big eyes taking him in without viciousness or irritation, “that you can guess just how my day went, Peter.”

He laughs a little, says, “Ah, yes, yes, you’re right,” and leans in close until his nose is but an inch from hers, “You woke up, brushed through your hair with your fingers, ate the apples I left you, pried a few splinters from your arms, and thought of me.”

He’s cheeky, as always. Wendy knows a crucial component to his boyishness is his ability to overlap teasing with cruelty until it falls like ribbons from his mouth to tie her up in soft knots. Most of the time, he just wants to wind a person up and see what they do.

Well, what can she do, ancient and bound as she is?

Someone young and sweet might tease him, tell him he must have been thinking of her as well if he’d made the effort to visit. That part of her has fallen asleep—it has coiled far away from light and warmth, it has taken refuge in the leisurely lengthening of years.

She laughs instead, hardly a huff of air, but his body goes still as a panther’s on a tree branch. All of the energy in his limbs goes straight to his eyes, which he uses to search her dark slashing brows and her fair dirty cheeks and the conundrum of a laugh leaving her unsmiling mouth.

Even when she truly was a child, Wendy has never been what Peter expected. He remembers her wild and he remembers the soprano of her giggling and he remembers a girl cutting through the forest in a bright white nightgown, accepting the scratch of thorns granting passage through their thickets in return for a few drops of blood.

This Wendy looks at him with fear and grief and an intimacy that chafes him as much as it soothes. She’s not one to smile or speak without having something to say. He’s turned her into a solemn woman, bird-boned and childish as her pre-teen looks may appear.

It’s a treat, hearing her crumb of laughter just as it annoys him to feel glad to hear it.

“You laugh?” he asks her, too idle to be anything but threatening.

She tenses, eyes lowering, and answers, “Yes, of course, I think of you. Who doesn’t think of the hand that feeds them?”

His dark impenetrable eyes and sparse beauty lash her subtle impertinence like a whip.

“Who doesn’t, indeed,” he replies.

And this, this is what keeps her alive. Or, better explained, this is what keeps him from killing her. He’d waited gleefully for her bitterness, wanted to drink it like the spicy dark hot chocolate Hook sometimes brings back from his travels. She was supposed to be bitter and hateful and vicious, a creature created in the space his shadow once occupied. A creature created in his image, the Pan rendered into a true god with the rotten perverted reflection of a girl remade spitting acid at him at every chance.

Peter excelled at killing unnecessary  bits of himself and planned to rid himself of her as soon as she began to rot black and bitter as the heart suffocating in his chest.

But here she is, not one thing--not a blind abomination, not a gruesome rebuilt creature--but many things. And none of them like him.

An abrupt decision flashes through him like lightening. The sky above shifts from velvet navy to bruised purple in an instant. It feels him readying himself for action. Neverland thrives on his mercurial nature just as its inhabitants dread it.

His voice cuts into the silence between them and he remembers thinking she might’ve admitted to liking it, only once and very long ago besides.

“For all that I do for you,” he begins, sinister in tone and sweet in the way he takes a gossamer hold of her nightgown’s hem peeking through the bars, simply feeling the fabric on his fingertips, “I have yet one more gift to give you.”

Wendy taps her index finger to the fingernail of the thumb pinching her nightgown and tells him, “I’m not sure I like your gifts very much,” and looks briefly around the primitive enclosure of what he jokingly calls her palace in his angrier moods.

He looks at her, her calm eyes and the neutral line of her mouth. 

Peter knows he’s cast her into this emotional hibernation, given her nothing a Wendy Darling needs to thrive and grow and change into something even better than she once was. It’s a testament to his tempestuous disposition that he has felt--for a hundred years--triumph over the weakening of her dampened spirit, thinking it would only serve to turn her into a spitting manipulative beast like him, but that he has veered wildly into grudging admiration upon the realization that Wendy Darling is another kind of animal entirely.

That he values her because she doesn’t need the ferocity, cloaks herself in no bravado, and fears him in the same breath as she gingerly rebukes him.

It makes him want to throw her out of the static monotonous state he’s put her in with the same fervor with which he locked her up and made a show making her turn the key to her own prison with a shaking hand, place the key on his tongue and watch him swallow it in front of her.

“Oh, you’ll like this gift,” Peter assures her, making rare contact when he swipes a finger down the slope of her nose, “Finally some depth on the outside to match a little of the abyss on the inside, Wendy.”

There, like the slow rippling disturbance of a rock thrown into a still lake, he sees the minute shifts in expression. She’s unsettled because he knows all her dark places, the ones in her mind and heart, and because a gift from him could easily be something as ghastly as cutting out her tongue so that she doesn’t have to trouble herself with speaking anymore.

She considers moving to the back of the cage and then thinks better of it. Two feet of distance won’t make a difference where Peter’s involved.

Wendy watches him unlock the door of her cage and swing it open.

His eyes are the most alive part of his face and his stare reminds her of a great dark shadow unfurling its wings.

“Come here,” he breathes, teeth revealed in his slow smile.

She takes his offered hand and instead of releasing her once she climbs out, he pulls her close to him. She smells the soil and the pine and the wind on his clothes.

Her hand twitches in his.

She says, “Peter.”

His smile looks so kind, her chest clenches.

The fear isn’t comforting this time—for the first time in a long time, the fear is fresh and ugly and Peter watches ravenously as it spreads over her face.

“Peter,” she says.

He doesn’t speak, just cups her jaw in his hands, which have incongruously always been the hands of a man. He is a hybrid, his shoulders hinting at broadness and his waist so narrow. His throat is strong and solid, his bone structure elfin. But his hands have always been a man’s hands.

He holds her carefully and she realizes in that moment just how much he dwarfs her in height, age and experience.

He holds her single century in his palms like he’s holding a bowl of feathers.

“Peter,” she whimpers and it’s the break in her patient sorrow he’s been waiting for.

He can’t have her withering away; not a single thing on this island was meant to be anything but throbbing with life.

“Shh,” he says, as he tilts her head up and leans his down, “The pain can be fresh again. It can feel good.”

He touches his open mouth to hers and exhales magic down her throat.

Peter lowers both of them to the ground, rubbing his fingers through her tangles as shudders of change wrack her body and she arches into the first jagged scream.

-

He stays with her all night as her body lengthens, as curves bud and ripen like magnolias, as flesh stretches taut over her belly and her hipbones emerge like a welcoming basin, as her face surrenders its childish round cheeks for feminine coquettish angles.

The pain appears immense, the metamorphosis from child to almost-woman. Her age looks to be near his now, a timeless seventeen. He revels at her every time she crawls out of the well of her agony to clutch at his arms and chest, to ask him why and beg him _please, P-Peter_ for relief and groan _oh oh_ through gritted teeth.

It’s not the first time he’s aged someone by any means. Many of the Lost Boys come to him as children and he ages them once they are fit to be soldiers, have earned their keep. They see it as a rite of passage and a gift, one that grants them increased strength and height and a deeper craving for violence.

The magic gives in easily in allowing someone who has lived years and years to catch up to their age—it’s the stopping the aging to a particular point that requires skill, which Peter has in spades.

The difference, he finds, in giving Wendy Darling a body she has admittedly earned in the sheer amount of time she’s been with him is that when his soldiers go through the change he doesn’t watch their pale legs lengthening beneath a translucent nightgown with a foreign hunger heating up his belly, doesn’t see the apex of their thighs darken into an alluring crevice under thin white fabric as his breath quickens, doesn’t watch their hips flare out subtle and beckoning as whispers in the dark, doesn’t track as their breasts grow plump and their nipples pebbled as his fingers stay stubbornly in her hair when they itch to trace the new topography of her body.

There is a reason there are no Lost Girls and it’s never occurred to him that this might be it, his fascination with her glorious formation on the jungle floor, now spread across his lap like a benevolent but greedy god might display a sacrifice.

Her collarbones grow slightly more prominent and he thinks of her solemn and fearfully fond of him in her cage. The bow of her mouth grows inviting and pink and he thinks of the fairies she insisted on seeing on her first visit, traipsing across his jungle barefoot and determined.

Her wrists become delicate as frost on window panes, her small fingers taper into something slender made to grip his biceps or his hair or his hips.

Peter wonders what her mature face will look like angry, wonders how the craving for violence manifests in a girl and wonders how she’ll look at him differently. If she looks at him differently like he’s looking at her differently.

He has plans in motion beyond this moment here with her. His manipulation has planted seeds of doubt and greed in the heads of everyone in the island. He kept a girl in a cage for an entire century because it suited him.

But his black heart lurches at the sight of her because where once there was an authentic enjoyment of Wendy Darling, now there is that loathed bond plus the unexpected component of wanting to know exactly how he fits into the notches of her body.

This, too, he can manage like any other scheme.

He just has to learn how to make her want to put her hands on him.

-

Wendy’s head is pounding. It feels like someone put a hatchet through it and she moans, raspy and screamed-out. The lower register of her voice startles her. It sounds…different.

Her hands curl into fists and they don’t feel like her hands. Her chest rises with her breath and it feels new. Like someone has poured her soul into an unknown vessel.

She can’t remember the last time she really felt anything that wasn’t accompanied by hypervigilance or low-grade terror. But there’s no room for it now. Good Lord, the pain.

And the buzzing. Everything hurts, but it’s also churning with energy. Wendy takes her strange hands and sets them at her hips and slides them upwards where she feels the crescents of her sides—the crest of sharp hipbones dipping into a waspish waist and curving out into her bust.

She places her palms on her breasts, feels the soft valley between them carefully. When she slides her palms over and off them, she brushes over tender nipples and gasps, biting her lip and turning a cheek into the dirt.

Her father spoke about migraines lasting for days, but she’d never experienced many headaches before now, and blearily sends a man most likely long dead her sympathy.

She calls the only name she can, much as she knows he’s the reason she’s in this state. Honestly, when is he not?

“Peter,” she calls with her eyes closed.

“You spent the night screaming yourself hoarse, Wendy,” is her amused reply, “Better be careful with your volume—any ruffian in the forest could have heard you and now you don’t even have the strength to call for help.”

He can be so difficult to navigate. One minute he’s holding her and breathing magic past her lips and the next he’s telling her to try harder at muffling her agonized screams.

Swallowing seems to rip open all the micro-tears in her throat, but she smiles very faintly.

“You’d be here,” she whispers, “So you’d either let them hurt me or you wouldn’t.”

She feels him sit down beside her torso, but can’t bring herself to open her eyes.

“I’d do whatever suited me,” he tells her.

“Yes,” she agrees easily, “That’s what I’m saying.”

There’s a moment of silence between them, unlike any they’ve had before. It’s rare for her to be outside of her cage, much less sprawled across the grass with her head pounding too hard to make sense of anything.

She stiffens when his thumb presses over her hidden kiss, tapping briefly over it. Peter is not one to be physical outside of fighting. He keeps a healthy distance between himself and everyone else when he’s not engaged in island warfare and even them, gutting someone doesn’t exactly count as real touch.

Wendy wonders if he’s as starved for it as she is, though she tries to keep her reaction minimal.

“Wendy,” he croons, “Wendy, open your eyes.”

Taking a minute to bask in the quiet black space behind her eyelids, she takes a breath and meets Peter’s gaze when she opens them.

Something’s different.

There’s always been a huge aesthetic appeal when it comes to Peter, but she’s never gotten the full effect before now. The whipcord strength in his bare forearms, the leather cuffs separating them from his capable hands, the brutality of his expression—they all truly occur to her for the first time for some unknown reason.

She processes them with a hitch in her breath and heat in her cheeks.

It’s unnerving, but not nearly as unnerving as looking down at her body.

Peter’s lips twist naturally into derisive smile, “So—like what I’ve done with the place?”

Her emotions coil into tight tense knots. She doesn’t know what’s happening. It feels like someone picked a scab from her toes to her hairline and now she’s raw and bleeding everywhere. All this emotion and nothing’s numb.

She almost misses the cage.

“What did you do,” she hisses, surprising herself, “to the _place_ , as you’ve decided to call it?”

Wendy doesn’t know what to call what happens to Peter Pan’s face after she snaps at him. He doesn’t look bored by her or scornful of her sadness or impatient with her despair.

He looks fascinated and absorbed and completely dangerous for it.

“There’s the fire,” he says, sounding validated.

“What did you do to my body?” she asks again, this time regaining a little of the calm she’s known for eons and epochs.

“No, no, Wendy,” he berates her, close to laughter, “Not when you were doing so well at lighting up. Ah, well, we can’t all be firecrackers, I suppose. As for your question, I simply gave you something you earned years ago.”

“Which was?”

“A glimmer of maturity to go with that old, old soul,” Peter says, raising his thumb to press at her kiss again.

Oh, her head hurts. She wants to sleep. In a bed. With sheets. Right now.

Trying to get sorted, she says, “I thought you wanted children. So much easier to mold than the older, headstrong ones, right?”

“Of course, I want the children,” he tells her, tender as he ever gets with his honesty, “But then they need to grow, just a touch, so they can fully realize what I’ve taught them. With you there was never a need. What was I going to have you do? Be my arrows or one of my knives? You’re too weak to be a weapon.”

It feels like her forehead’s been split open, so she turns her cheek back to the dirt and snorts, “How sweet you are to me.”

He gets a grip on her hair and squeezes until she hisses and whimpers. “I don’t think we need to have a conversation about how sweet _you_ need to be to _me_ ,” he says, almost affectionate.

The impulse to withdraw is strong, but the new impulses are stronger. A child cowers, but an almost-woman wants something more visceral. There is the desire to soothe and the desire to stoke the fire and it all comes together in the simplest way: touch.

Her new fingers delve into her hair and find his fist. They curl around and caress his clenched fingers until they release, entangling them together and laying them on her stomach.

Satisfied with his surprising lack of animosity at her actions, she gives him a faint smile.

“Sometimes I think you give me things just so you can punish me for having them,” she tells him and finally surrenders to sleep, still holding his hand.


End file.
